Saving the Mummy
The embodiment of curiosity on campus has altered between obsession and obscurity since 1876.
By Karl Rhodes
’Twas the night before Christmas, 1910. Walter Beverly, R’11, was sleeping peacefully on the third floor of old Ryland Hall downtown when A.R. Hawkins, R’12, burst into his room shouting “Fire! Fire!”
Beverly responded sluggishly, so Hawkins dragged him out of bed and bolted back into the hallway yelling “Fire! Fire!”
As he gathered his wits, Beverly realized that the fire was burning directly above his room. He scrambled down the stairs and escaped onto the lawn, where he watched the flames spread as the north wing of the building began to collapse.
Fearing a total loss, the fire chief called for volunteers to remove everything of value from the south end of the building. President Frederic Boatwright smashed the library door with an axe, and they rescued more than 15,000 volumes. They also saved the college’s Egyptian mummy.
The students set her down carefully on the lawn amid piles of books, a bust of Cicero and a reproduction of Venus de Milo. She rested there until dawn, when they carried her to Boatwright’s nearby home and placed her under the president’s Christmas tree. The mummy was safe—for the moment.
Innocents abroad
Dr. Jabez L.M. Curry, a Richmond professor and trustee, purchased the mummy in Egypt in 1875 from an American gentleman who drove a hard bargain.
It was no run-of-the-mill mummy, the American claimed. She once belonged to the Prince of Wales, a gift from the viceroy. She was retrieved at “considerable risk” by British Vice Consul Mustapha Aga and American Edwin Smith, who descended a 90-foot shaft and discovered 30 mummies. The prince took 20 of them back to England, but he gave one to the American gentleman, who was now willing to sell it to Curry.
The mummy arrived on campus to a gala reception and banquet in her honor. She was the embodiment of curiosity. No one was able to read the hieroglyphs on her coffin until James Henry Breasted, a famous Egyptologist, visited the college in 1897. He pronounced her “Thi-Ameny-Net”—the first utterance of her name in at least 2,500 years. According to the hieroglyphs, her father was Nesy-Amon, and her mother was Ru Ru or Lu Lu. They lived sometime between 950 B.C. and 730 B.C. Prayers on her coffin requested everything she would need in her next life, including 1,000 jars of beer.
For many years, the mummy was Richmond College’s most prized possession, but when the college moved to the Westhampton campus in 1914, there was no place to display Thi-Ameny-Net. She was crudely stored in the basement of North Court, exposed to high humidity, gnawing rats and student pranks.
The mummy returns
The discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 rescued Thi-Ameny-Net from obscurity. Suddenly, people were keenly interested in mummies again, and the University had the only one in town.
President Boatwright invited the community to a special viewing of Thi-Ameny-Net in the faculty room of Richmond College, and thousands of people swarmed to the free exhibit. A few years later, the mummy became the centerpiece of a biology museum that opened on the top floor of Maryland Hall in 1933.
By 1977, however, the University’s enthusiasm for the mummy had waned once more. The biology department was moving out of Maryland Hall, and most of the biology professors “did not feel that the mummy fit with what they were doing,” recalls Katherine Smith, W’61, the University’s science librarian at the time. “My recollection is that Stuart Wheeler (associate professor of classical studies) wanted it, and they didn’t.”
In the last year of his life, Wheeler refused to say what happened next, but he gave the following account to the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1999: “I got the mummy and case when they closed down the biology museum. They told me they were going to throw it away.”
Dr. Frank Leftwich, the biology professor who was in charge of the move, says that story is just another mummy myth. “We understood the importance of the mummy,” he insists. “We certainly would not have thrown it away.”
The mummy’s secret
Whether or not Wheeler saved the mummy from the dumpster, he certainly protected her for the next 30 years. He and several students converted a large closet in North Court into a tiny museum called the Ancient World Gallery, where Thi-Ameny-Net remains on display today.
Wheeler, who died in August 2006, was convinced that the mummy and the coffin are a matching set because they were exhumed before many witnesses, including the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII. The only source of that story, however, is the American gentlemen who sold the mummy to Curry, and Curry never revealed the man’s identity.
According to a story in the Richmond College Messenger in 1897, the American gentleman was “born in Connecticut and had been living in Egypt for 17 years, studying archaeology and the ancient literature.”
That description matches Edwin Smith, one of the men who had exhumed the mummies for the Prince of Wales. Smith was an antiquities dealer who owned the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, one of the oldest medical documents ever found. He had purchased the papyrus from Mustapha Aga, the other man who had exhumed the mummies for the prince.
Historians portray Smith as a forger, loan shark and con artist. Some even suggest that he and Aga staged the exhumation of the 30 mummies.
“Smith and [Aga] entertained the British prince by going down a 90-foot shaft and bringing up 30 mummies,” writes John Wilson in Signs & Wonders Upon Pharaoh. “How is it possible to produce 30 mummies on order, even for royalty?”
So the mummy of North Court remains mysterious. Shrouded by more myths than linens, she continues to do what she has done so well for the past 131 years—arouse curiosity among students who wonder about life and death in ancient Egypt.
Key sources for this story include: “Account of Coffins and Mummies Discovered in Egypt on the Occasion of the Visit of H.R.H. The Prince of Wales,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom (1874); “That Merry Christmas of 1910,” The Spider (1911); “Egyptian Exhibit Attracts Many,” The Collegian (April 27, 1923); “Locating Information in an Egyptian Text” Journal of the American Society for Information Science (1993); and “The Coffins and Mummies Presented to Edward Prince of Wales,” Discussions in Egyptology (2000).
Web bonus: To read Walter Beverly’s entire account of the old Ryland Hall fire, “That Merry Christmas of 1910,” visit the online version of the Richmond alumni magazine at magazine.richmond.edu.